by K. Chess
“Use your head, man. Notoriety. She’s notorious. You don’t want sympathy—you want attention. Anybody would like to know what’s going on in that woman’s head, right? She’s all over the tabloids. And you’ve got her talking about herself. It’s great! Hey, are you even listening down there?”
Emptied out, the living room where Vikram stood appeared much larger than it had the first time he was in the junk-filled house. Daylight sifted in through the two windows that gave onto the front porch and the one on the north wall, all three of them shrouded with the disintegrating lace curtains that predated Mrs. Defoe’s tenancy. Gold linoleum covered the floor, curled up in the corners. They’d scrubbed at that linoleum for hours on their knees, but the stains persisted. Someday, Dwayne said, it could be stripped to expose the hardwood floorboards beneath, but Vikram thought that what the place really needed was some rugs or carpeting or something to muffle the echoes and make it feel more inhabited. Less like a tomb.
“Vikram?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m listening. How is your friend going to give me a recording to use without getting himself in trouble?”
“This is the best part. You do a FOIA request for the file, once the case is closed.”
“Foil?”
“FOIA. It’s the Freedom of Information Act! Government agencies have to give you the information you want. It’s for transparency.”
Vikram was skeptical. “How long is that going to take?”
“Hold on,” Dwayne called down after a minute. “I’m Googling it.”
Wes came clomping down the rest of the stairs in his boots. He dropped the box—collectible china figurines, it looked like—in the hall. “Wanna take a smoke break?”
“You don’t even smoke.” Still, Vikram followed him out through the cleared kitchen and jumped down after him onto the soft ground of the bare yard. Over by a fence post, Dwayne had placed a flowerpot containing an ossified African violet discovered on the top shelf of his grandmother’s linen closet. It sat in the dirt, half full of cigarette ends now. Vikram pulled a new one out of his pack and lit it. “You want?”
“Nah.” Wes pulled out a tin and pinched a pea-sized amount of whatever was inside onto the webbing between his outstretched thumb and forefinger. He inhaled sharply, a practiced gesture very familiar to Vikram.
“Hold on! What’s that?”
“Calm down. It’s just snuff, not sniff. I assume you’ve tried it.”
Vikram sighed, disgusted by his own momentary hope. “Snuff? Yeah. I tried it when I first got here.”
“Nasty, right? Not the same at all.”
“Sometimes, I wish I’d thought to fill up my whole bag with cans of sniff when I crossed. Just think what I could sell that for.”
“Are you joking? You would have used it all by now.”
“Right.” Vikram laughed mirthlessly. “I’d be sitting here regretting that, on top of, you know, everything else in my life.”
“Look, dude, don’t take it so hard. There’s plenty of other UDPs out there besides Oliveira. What about trying someone else? There’s that guy who was on reality TV—”
“No. I don’t care anymore.” He flicked his cigarette. “I’m sorry, but I just don’t.”
“You don’t have to apologize.”
Vikram looked at Wes’s neck, at the scar like a face in a photograph clumsily scratched out. Once again, like a man probing an unhealed wound, he considered the missing book. He knew the concept of a museum wasn’t about Sleight, but about every vanished individual Sleight stood for.
He’d tried so hard to convince Hel that the very premise of her obsession was faulty, that Sleight’s death couldn’t possibly have been the catalyst for the changes to the world. But did he believe that she was wrong? Without knowing it, he too had started to believe.
Such a little thing, 328 pages, paper and ink, pocket-sized. Pulp from trees that never grew. Different trees had grown in their place and were cut down in their stead to have different words printed on them. For Vikram, the museum idea was rooted in this house. The house was Sleight and Sleight was Jonas. Jonas their collective loss. Without the book, none of it made sense.
As far as the pyronauts could determine, their erstwhile visitor had left camp without taking a thing that did not belong to him. This discovery came as a pleasant surprise to John Gund, but Asyl had an opposite reaction. She insisted that they go after Aitch. A lone man wandering the wastes would surely die, unsupplied and unprotected. John Gund pointed out that Aitch was no victim of fortune. He’d left them voluntarily and in the same condition in which he’d arrived, and he seemed to have been getting along just fine without them for most of his life. She wouldn’t listen to reason. She insisted.
Sometimes, John Gund couldn’t help but feel pity for Asyl, native to such a blighted world. Her childhood, spent in a bunker. Her youth, dominated by the warnings of the aliens and the protective rules of the community elders. The reproachful stories men like him told her. In choosing the life of a ranger, she’d taken the most adventurous option that chance had offered her, but there was so much she hadn’t seen. Even the danger of the microbes became monotonous in its unrelenting consistency. What could she know about risk? About a man who walked through the world without a helmet and liked it that way?
John Gund’s own youth was a bygone era and though he did not mourn its passage as much as he pretended to, he wouldn’t have traded away the experience. For better or worse, it had formed him. The women, free in a way that Asyl was not. The drink. The weight of dice in his hands. Cards facedown on the felt, the thrill of that. A ball bouncing from slot to slot and the wind in his hair as he rode through the night in an open pod.
This man Asyl wanted to follow was as young as she, born After the fall of the world, but Aitch lived closer to the way John Gund once had, back when he was a youth himself. Gund forced himself to admit it—Aitch would have understood about the wind. Outlaws always do.
Every stupid risk and misstep, he thought to himself. Even every weakness forms us.
So John Gund did not protest. He sorted through their unmolested gear in anticipation of their departure, distributing it between their two packs. Fuel and heater in his, compressed tent in Asyl’s, water bags in his, nested pots and food packets in hers—he always did his best to take the slightly heavier items without skewing the division so obviously that she would notice. Meanwhile, having won the argument, Asyl set about determining which way they should go to overtake the stranger.
First, she unpacked the spyglass and scanned the surrounding hills in all directions, hoping for a glimpse of Aitch’s departing figure. Other teams before them here, assiduous in their burning, made sure that no trees stood to obstruct Asyl’s view. The regrowth of foliage on even the farthest hills was insufficiently developed to hide a fleeing man. She should have been able to spot him if he were anywhere around. John Gund pointed out that this meant the man must have quite a lead on them.
Undeterred, Asyl paced the perimeter of the area where they’d spent the night, searching for traces in the dust. He knew her to be an expert tracker. When she chose a direction, he didn’t try to argue. They turned their backs on the coordinates they’d been assigned to test and clear and walked in the opposite direction.
Hel adjusted the focus on her binoculars. A waste of money, as it turned out, since Donaldson and Angelene kept the blinds in their third-floor apartment shut at all times. When Hel twisted the knob, she could make slats come into clear relief, but magnification couldn’t give her the power to see through. Both women were inside now; she’d seen them come home an hour ago. Would they stay in place, or would this be the night they both went out together, giving her a chance? If so, she’d be ready.
Only two stars visible tonight and in commemoration of her mission, she’d named them Gund and Asyl. The bright one after Asyl, of course, the one that she could always find, every night—the one to steer by. Refuge. The North Star. John Gund’s lesser star hovere
d above the horizon. Maybe it was not a star at all but a satellite or a planet. Venus.
In order to maintain a sight line from the building across the way while staying low enough not to be seen from the street, Hel had to lie on her belly. She’d brought Vikram’s ski parka and a scratchy plaid wool picnic blanket, misshapen from an accidental machine drying, but her elbows were sore from leaning on them and her arched back ached. If she’d taken a moment with the binoculars, she would have been able to look at all the other rooftops around, where residents hunched with secret cigarettes in the short winter evenings or spread their towels to tan in the summer sun. The sky-high cocktail bars Hel’s city had been known for were beginning to be popular in this New York, too. With their finite dimensions and age-old geographical peculiarities, these five boroughs were destined to be crowded with a population strangling itself. For space and light and freedom, people went up. No matter what the differences, there would never be anywhere else to go.
But Hel didn’t have time to look around. She kept her binoculars trained on one particular building, on the left-hand side of the top floor. Two evenings in a row, as the dark came on, she’d watched the yellow rectangles light up. A switch being flicked, lamps going on in those secret rooms.
Please let them leave. Please.
As far as she could tell, Vikram hadn’t been home to the apartment in the Bronx since their fight. Yet it occurred to her that their lives were running more tightly in parallel than ever. They were both nocturnal now. She spent the daylight hours in his bed while he slept somewhere else—at Kabir’s house or with his new friends—and when the late fall sun lowered in a sky the color of a healthy tongue, they each commuted to Queens. Him, far east to Jamaica for his security job. Her, here, to Long Island City. On her mission. Potential consequences to her actions, the risks she was running—once, these might have troubled Hel, but now, they didn’t seem to register. Yet she didn’t feel empty, as she had in the long days of depression. Her fascination with the recovery of the book animated her in the same way the idea for the museum once had.
Today, she’d skipped her Reintegration Education meeting. No excuse, which meant an automatic write-up.
Then, there was the breaking and entering.
This building where she watched and waited had SPACE FOR RENT signs posted, and the camera mounted in the corner looked fake. It wasn’t hard to clamber up on top of the angled piece of corrugated steel that shielded the external stairs. The metal had rumbled noisily under her feet like stagecraft thunder. It should have scared her, the thought that it might give way, but instead it made Hel feel brave, like a comic book hero—the Peregrine Falcon from her childhood—as she boosted herself onto the roof. The 7 didn’t emerge from its tunnel until it reached Hunters Point Avenue, one stop deeper into Queens. Without elevated trains, it was quieter up here than she was used to. But really, the roof around her looked like the roof of every building she’d ever seen, her whole life. Tar was tar, after all, and air was air.
She rubbed at her eyelids with gloved fingertips. Under her blanket, she hunkered down, like a squirrel, high up in the branches of its winter drey. All the leaves that hid her from view in the warm summer months had fallen—dead—but her nest remained, a tangle of messy branches. The hidden illusion of the world ripped away and everything underneath exposed.
People would steal. They would work to cross you in any way they could. They didn’t need a reason to do those things. They were driven by forces beyond understanding.
This card is below you. The thing you must overcome.
Motion across the way. The green door of Donaldson’s redbrick building swung open and a figure stepped out. Without shifting position, Hel raised the binoculars. Angelene stood on the stoop, reaching behind her to pull the hood of a sweatshirt out of a hastily thrown-on Yankees jacket. Hel had been a Dodgers fan at home, but the Dodgers were across the country here; she’d come to like the Yankees simply because of the geographical and historical continuity. Angelene looked both ways and crossed the street, walking briskly in the direction of the subway a few blocks away.
Where was Donaldson? Not with her wife. She must still be inside. One down and one to go.
Angelene’s shape had passed entirely out of sight now. “Please,” Hel said—under her breath, but aloud. “Please.” She thought of Vikram, how he’d risen from the table, face obscured like a moon in a polluted sky. She remembered the pause as he stood there, the long moment in which anything from him had seemed possible. How he’d bumped his shoulder against the doorframe in his hurry to get away.
Might she have stopped him, if she’d followed?
But she’d had nothing to say to him. No excuse. This was the only way.
Lost in rumination, she almost missed Donaldson’s exit. It was the lights going out—the abrupt vanishment of those yellow rectangles—that attracted her attention. Biting her lip to shock herself back into her body, Hel pointed the binoculars to the door downstairs in time to see it open.
Ayanna Donaldson wore sweatpants, but they were the nice kind—the kind that was seemingly acceptable outside the home in this world—and a tailored leather jacket. Braids hung down to the collar, making her look girlish. She did not linger on the doorstep. Without hesitation, she pounded down to the street and took off in the opposite direction from Angelene in a loping half run.
Now. The apartment was empty. Now. And Donaldson was alone.
She could break into the house, or she could follow. Where was the book more likely to be? Hel froze with indecision, knowing that if she wanted to follow, she’d need to get moving.
As she watched Donaldson’s silhouette below, its progress down the block abruptly halted. She stood just beyond the bright circle cast by a streetlight, and seemed to be conversing with someone else, a short man with broad shoulders. A friend she was meeting? Where had he come from? The two faced each other in front of a shuttered shoe repair store, its pull-down grate splashed with graffiti. The man leaning into Donaldson’s space as if he were whispering in her ear. The intimacy of their body language deceived Hel so completely that she was shocked when Donaldson flinched back, alarmed when the man roughly grabbed her arm.
She seemed to say something to the man and snapped open her clutch purse, rummaging inside. Hel watched as, with a short and economical movement, the man knocked it from her hands, the contents spilling at her feet. Donaldson dropped to her knees, but the man hauled her upright by the arm he was still holding. He was speaking, his mouth moving.
The man didn’t seem to have a weapon. But Hel did. She always did. She felt the knife’s weight by her side and reached down to touch it.
A rushing in her ears that whispered go!
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The man who slipped Hel off had grabbed her on a stretch of sidewalk just beyond the trolley line terminus, brandishing a large clasp knife with a fake mother-of-pearl handle. He’d backed her up against a low wall at the edge of Prospect Park, the rough bricks snagging at her stockings, and he’d breathed in her air as he told her what he wanted from her, nice and easy, nice and easy.
Somehow, the attacker had mistaken her for a woman headed home alone. He didn’t realize Jonas was with her. Her son was young then—five and a half—and forever running up ahead, eager to be the one who got somewhere first. The thought of him had played urgently in her mind while the man threatened her. Where was Jonas? Would he stop, realizing his mother wasn’t following? Would he come back to her, putting himself in danger too?
As the stranger displayed his weapon in front of her eyes, too close for Hel to focus on as he held her pinned, he told her in a surprisingly soft voice how he would start by carving up her face and finish with her gootch. He made the knife dance in front of her, pricking her bottom lip with the tip, and when she reached out to stop it with her right hand—not a plan, by any means, but a terrified reaction—the blade bit into all four of her fingers, bit deep, and she’d yelled, both in pain and surprise. H
e’d thrown her to the ground, where she caught herself with her hands—her good hand and her bad hand, hot blood and cold, damp leaves—and regretted the noise she’d made. Where was Jonas? How desperately she’d hoped that if he was watching, he would be terrified into speechlessness. Stay still, Jonas. Stay quiet. Do nothing to attract the bad man’s attention.
Later, in the back of the police van, the start of that haunting, piacular feeling in her chest, she’d hugged Jonas tight and told him how proud she was. How brave and smart he’d been, to run and get a trolley guard to help.
And after that, she’d carried her own knife—always.
“Here you go,” said Dwayne, handing Vikram a bundle of translucent plastic that looked something like an enormous folded shower curtain. “I’ve got blankets downstairs. Let me find the pump.” He thrust the plastic, heavier than it seemed it should be, into Vikram’s arms. “Unfold it,” Dwayne said, shooting him a look of frustration modulated somewhat by pity. “You never seen an air mattress? Don’t answer that.”
An assortment of boxes and storage bins still filled the master bedroom all the way up to the eaves. On the other side of the stairs, a cold-water washroom and a second bedroom took up the other half of the floor space. It was here, in this half-cleared smaller room, that Vikram was to sleep. He knelt on the bare boards just inside the door and unfolded the vinyl into a square.
Though Wes and Ari had been nothing but hospitable, Vikram could tell he was underfoot in the flat, getting ready for work when the others were coming home and cooking dinner. His back complained from two days on a couch too short for his full height. In the middle of the afternoon yesterday, he’d woken from a fitful sleep to the sound of someone in the apartment directly above, running water. He’d stayed there in his fetal curl, listening to the water in the pipes, and remembered his mother and her bathtub martyrdom. But he couldn’t go back to his own apartment, no matter that he paid the rent, no matter that he knew he was in the right, no matter that he longed to hold Hel in his arms.
